Something To Hunt

i. Think of a tiger first spotting its prey. The silence of it. The sudden singularity of purpose. Hair bristled, stomach to the grass, unbearably still, until: pounce. ii. Much of my work revolves around questions of compulsion and drive. What motivates a sound, what pulls it forward? Can we conjure, outside tonality, that inexplicable sense of craving that seems to tug ti towards do?iii. Questions of where to go and why haunt many in my ilk. We the hyper-mobile, hyper-privileged generation, saturated with choice and yet raised without the bedtime lies of progress, truth and tribal pride that guided so many before us. Our prey is pre-packaged; our gods are dead. So what do we search for? What do we hunt?iv. Something to Hunt is a timbral Shepard tone -- a multidimensional but unidirectional thrust that circles back and pushes forth relentlessly, obsessively, until its end. Looking for something. Hungry for meat. Something to Hunt was commissioned on receipt of a 2012 Darmstadt Stipendienpreis. It was premiered by Dal Niente at the 2014 Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music, where it was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis.